132 MADE WITH PASSION ? J f " '\. The Hemphill Folk Art Collection in the National Museum of American Art Lynda Roscoe Hartigan One of the premier collections of Amencan folk art...Gathered in the second half of this century, the diverse, often whimsical Hemphill collection ranges from bottlecap sculptures to weather vanes, from weavings to Howard Finster paintings. 85 color, 186 b&w illus. 256 pp. Cloth: 0-87474-293-5 $50.00 Available at fine bookstores Smithsonian Institution Press Dept. 900 Blue Ridge Summit, P A 17294-0900 800/782-4612. 717/794-2148 . I KS N TAPE O co Lt') c.c N en < (.,) .ß: U CI:I cu = 't: Q C. cu Z Z C c en ,.... )( Q = World's Largest SelectIOn of Audio Books · Best Sellers I on Cassette $ c: · Full-length Readings go :-of · Call for Free ; Brochure I I \ \ -' (800) 626-3333 Thinking Retirement? Warm Wlnters Without Florida's Crowds On St. Simon Island. Next to Sea Island About 300 Homes on l Golf Holes 1-800-635-39"'11 Thl does not constitute an offenng for ale in tho e .,tate '\\ here such an offering cannOt be made OCTOBER 29,1990 only after the hunger strike ended. The strike began to disintegrate on July 31st, after one of the strikers, Paddy Quinn, lapsed into a coma, and his mother exercised her right as next of kin and had him taken to a hospital. Other families followed her example. When the prisoners and the I.R.A. leadership recall their calculations, they sound dense in their inability to see that the British, too, had principles. Fanatics don't understand any righ- teousness but their own. U nfortunate- ly, Mrs. Thatcher's arrogance made it hard for the strikers to understand that the British public would never en- dow with moral legitimacy men they thought of as assassins. Yet the emo- tional turmoil in the prison seems piti- able, especially in contrast with British immobility. O'Malley's portrait of McFarlane shows a good-natured man hardening under stress: insisting after every set- back that another death would compel the British to back down, sending away a Red Cross delegation that tried to intervene, and helping the I.R.A. sab- otage the negotiating efforts of a dele- gation from the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace-quasi-governmen- tal emissaries from the Republic. The h unger strikers' families grew bewil- dered. Some feared that they were be- ing used by the I.R.A. Some were torn because, though they had promised not to intervene, they had never really be- lieved that their sons' or husbands' lives would be at risk. Their recollections of affectionate small talk during their vis- its suggest that the strikers tried to feign normality, but with the approach of death they seemed to move into a world of their own, bound only to each other by a concept of honor at once noble and archaic.... O'Malley's brief biographies of these martyrs show us that violent nationalism was the only opportunity their society offered the hunger strikers to transform or tran- scend their ordinariness. One of O'Malley's most telling witnesses- Pat McGeown, a hunger striker who survived because his wife had him hos- pitalized when he became comatose- recalls a conversation with Micky Devine, the last striker to die, a week before his death. Devine told Mc- Geown that he thought the strikes should be ended, but refused to end his, because he didn't want to seem con- cerned about saving his own life. McGeown himself embodies the strik- ers' gallantry-or quixotism. From the first, he had been critical of Sands' and McFarlane's plans, and after Sands died he argued for ending the strike. Yet when the strike looked as if it were about to fail he volunteered to join it. O'Malley deepens our sadness by reminding us that these deaths only further polarized the two communities of Northern Ireland. His interviews record two separate choruses making totally divergent comments on the ac- tion. All during the strike, atrocities and accusations of atrocity continued: nobody in Northern Ireland felt free to grieve impartially. Protestants who counted up their dead saw Catholic support for the hunger strikers as proof that Catholics supported murder. As Orwell summed it up in his essay "N otes on Nationalism," "Loyalty is involved, so pity ceases to function." O'Malley quotes an essay by the histo- rian Frank Wright explaining the psy- chological machinery that permits ter- rorists to usurp leadership: When people live in the shade of vio- lence, they also live in fear of the worst things said and done in their name, because they know they are in danger of being held responsible for them by the other side. It becomes difficult to repudiate "our" confrontationalists when the same people may be "our" defender against whatever they provoke. O'Malley doesn't deliberately lacer- ate our feelings. The facts do. The combination of his particulars with the generalizations of the psychologists, historians, and philosophers whose re- flections he has explored helps us un- derstand this intractable quarrel, and all those other quarrels in which groups who identify themselves by race, eth- nicity, language, religion-but above all by their conviction that they are victims-justify their cruelty by ap- pealing to "memories of past injustice and humiliation." O'Malley's story of two English-speaking communities who squandered the benefits of consti- tutional government is frightening, for his theme-the destructive effects of feelings of beleaguerment, entrapment, and victimization-is echoed in every morning's newspaper. - NAOMI BLIVEN . NO COMMENT DEPARTMENT [Adv. in the Montgomery (Ala.) A dvertlser ] WOLF PUPS 88% loyal companions, beau- tiful mar kings.